Here is Where I Walk: Episodes From a Life in the Forest

By Leslie Carol Roberts

It is in the Presidio of San Francisco, California, that Leslie Carol Roberts walks. The Presidio, America’s only residential national park tucked wholly into an urban setting, is a fading historic forest. Here is where Leslie’s memories of other places, people, and travels emerge. Here is where the author’s home has been for more than a decade, and here is the place she raised her two children as a single mother.

In layered stories of her life and travels, Leslie turns her daily walks into revelations of deeper meaning. From Maryland to Iowa to Tasmania, we follow a fierce and keenly observant walker through places of exquisite beauty and complexity. Her daily walks inspire Leslie to accept the invitation of the beckoning trees where she finds herself colliding with the urban coyote, the peculiar banana slug, and the manzanita. She also notes both ridiculous and poignant aspects of human ecosystems in pursuit of what it means to live a life of creativity and creation from scientist-activists battling to save environments to the tragic realities of ordinary life.

In this finely crafted eco-memoir, each place provides Leslie with exactly the scaffolding needed to survive, with nature serving as the tonic. Here is Where I Walk provides a vivid answer to how we can find our place, not only in nature but within ourselves and the world we walk.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781948908085

Book preview

Author

INTRODUCTION

Nature is what we see—the hill, the afternoon, squirrel, eclipse, the bumblebee. Nay, nature is heaven. Nature is what we hear . . .

—Emily Dickinson

There are reports in the esteemed journal Nature that scientists have discovered what is called the Wood Wide Web, a revelation that trees and fungi converse, sharing across species information about their needs and alerting each other to predation threats. Living in the midst of one of America’s great historic forests—a forest with the same designation as historic human-built structures, these discoveries confirmed what I believe so many of us walkers-of-woods have long sensed. For what is a walk in a forest if not a chance to fully and deeply celebrate the sauntering and reflective mind? The brain hopping like some nimble coyote over rocks bridging a river? Legs astride. Arms lifting a drink of cool water to lips, water dripping down chin. Minty floral scent of the eucalyptus tree, indifferent and slightly smug robins hopping on the trailside. The woods hold in abeyance the battering ram of time and the pressures and exigencies of modern life, they summon with reckless vigor memories of people alive and dead, loved and despised. The woods are not a quiet place, we walkers of the forest know, and it is this cacophony we seek in this nature we love. We should all be at the barricades lobbying for these places of solace and interiority, these places complex and cruel, these places that need and don’t need us that can be obliterated by grasping gangrenous developers, these places that will yet exist as memory and whose pieces as seed and spore will return or relocate or represent in new ways. And so the forest is a place of blind, muscular hope.

The Presidio of San Francisco is a heavily forested and densely historical urban national park, and each walk and vista offers a performance of place almost noisy with varied voices—both of the woods and not. There is the backdrop of Army architecture and some moments where design aesthetics were privileged over military bureaucracy, and these buildings have a particular resonance. First human activities date back 10,000 years, and archeologists have unearthed evidence that the Ohlone people lived here as early as 740 AD. Fringe marshlands were home to small villages of seasonal and more permanent settlements, which ended when the Spanish military, civilians, and a single Franciscan priest arrived in 1776 to set up a presidio, or garrison.

They arrived by land, 193 civilians, 1,000 head of cattle, traveling from Sonora, Mexico. There were presidios erected across what is now called California, and the San Francisco Bay encampment faced particular challenges in the lack of arable land, the inhospitable winds and sand, and the fast habitat destruction brought on by cattle grazing.

The Presidio was controlled from 1776 until 1822 by the Spanish and then by Mexico until the United States took over in 1846. In 1972, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area was created, and includes the Presidio, Alcatraz, and Muir Woods in its 76,500 acres, making it one of the largest urban national parks in the world. There are 800 acres of open space in the Presidio, or 54 percent of its total, and 145 acres support remnant native plant communities ranging from wildflowers to oak woodlands. Sixteen rare plant species make their home here, including five protected by the Endangered Species Act. In 1996 Congress created the Presidio Trust, transferring eighty percent of the former military post to its jurisdiction (the National Park Service manages the shoreline perimeters.) A board was set up, appointed by the president of the United States, and the Presidio charter was written dictating that the Presidio had to preserve what was in its jurisdiction and also figure out how to build and maintain non-federal financial support. If they failed to do so, the Presidio could be sold off as excess land. This meant that the buildings and sites needed to be repurposed to bring in tenants—nonprofits and for-profits, residents and tourists. This was an experiment of sorts—the first park with an economic mission to support itself without government aid. (The Presidio hit this goal in 2013, by the way.)

The Presidio forest is mature trees and these days a wave of younger trees—part of a forest-replenishment plan—eucalyptus, pines, cypress, planted from the 1880s through the 1940s by the US Army and slowly aging out. During the 218 years the Presidio was an Army post, tree planting was a way to shield both from the wind and weather and a way to create theater—the grand and mysterious might of a militarized Presidio masked from civilian view by dense woods. The forest today is surrounded by major roadways, including Highway 101, which tunnel through and bisect and frame it on two sides. Several of the famed stands of trees have been entirely removed and replanted because crowding had left the mature trees unhealthy and weak, prone to falling during winter wind storms. You can easily spy the sick trees on a walk in these woods: They have very long, scrawny trunks and a thin, wide canopy—a desperate reach in a dense wood towards light needed to survive. They have the same affect as starving humans, elongated and sinewy, forms folding in peculiar ways.

There is a resonance and sense of awe in these woods, the forest’s determined survival against the odds: how the trees define the 1,480 acres of park, trees laced with hiking trails, ringed by sandy beaches and soaring cliffs and vistas, trees tucked into the northern corner of San Francisco, patrolled by coyotes, skunks, and raptors, banana slugs slouching amidst scraps of euc leaves. Even as humans redesign the place to make it suited to modern recreation and corporate life and the arts—people in tight cycling kits roar around on road bikes, heaving plates of artisan tacos served with agave liquors, a museum celebrating the cartoons of Walt Disney; a corporate headquarters for the Star Wars artists complete with Yoda statue; the majestic forest dominates it all.

My family and I moved to the Presidio in 2005. We were coming home to San Francisco and our former neighborhood in the Mission had lost its charm for me. My mother-lens saw in high-relief how trash accumulated on sidewalks and around curbs, how on weekends crosswalks jammed with drunks in search of bacon-leavened donuts, mussels and fries or whatever the latest food craze might be—was no place for me to rear young children.

From the first days in the Presidio, I walked the woods. In the beginning, the Presidio was underpopulated and the homes were in ill repair. The only other walkers were a diplomat from the local South Korean consulate—always nattily attired in a shiny silver suit and bright tie—and a Buddhist monk in an orange robe. We would smile and nod at each other.

On these many years of walks, over the months, the forest has given me ample time to commune with the place and with my own memories. I don’t doubt that the trees are in conversation with each other; and I don’t doubt that they are also speaking to me. Trees are wonderful companions in thinking, and they provide a particular aesthetic that has caused artists, writers, and naturalists across the years to pause and ponder how glorious a tree is in all its singular characteristics.

There is a particular cypress tree I look at each day, morning and night. It stands at the top of the dunes immediately behind my house. It is a tangled messy tree, using a strategy leveraging half cracked off, huge lower branches to serve as support against the rough Pacific winter storms. This quality often prompts guests to ask if I should hire an arborist to trim these unsightly branches, to facilitate my view west, an otherwise open shot across the Pacific Ocean to the Farallon Islands. I then explain what the tree is up to, how it accommodates the weather and wind with its plan to press fallen limbs in a sort of skirt around its base. I also explain that without the tree, the wind and rain would blast me and the already quivering window panes might be inclined to blow right out here on top of the dunes.

So the tree, I conclude, has my back, and my story of its needs is a way for me to have its back in turn.

Seeing beauty in a fallen limb, observing an Anna’s hummingbird alight on a tendril; tracing the path of the great-horned owl as it finds its place as night falls: All of this artistry is given to me by this one cypress tree. And I am grateful for it.

I also found the trees eased my mind. I would turn away from the mundane anxieties of life as a single mother in an expensive city, and in turn flow towards ideas about art, about my own life as a creative, from girlhood walks and studio art classes, to reporting the news in far-flung places like Antarctica, to the elations of my children’s births and young lives, to the sadness of people lost along the path. So the forest came to be a place for me to hear my own story and when I returned from my walks, sometimes with fresh jottings in a small brown notebook, I would sit down for an hour or so, in the bright morning light, and put down these thoughts. Or I would wait for my children to fall asleep and then I would sit at my Steelcase desk, a greenish-grey desk, pushed against the window and in the dark stare at my tree and bash out words as they came to mind. And so. I embrace this conversation fomented and encouraged by the trees and for the fact that each walk in each forest or wood is an interaction singular and rich.

EPISODE ONE

In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous.

—Aristotle

The caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf who keeps the caribou strong.

—Keewatin Inuit saying

January: On Coyotes

The sun rises on us all in the Presidio National Park, the coyotes, the doves, the hummingbirds, the raptors, the slugs, the humans, the waves crashing on Baker Beach, and it is in this light I walk. The early morning finds the last of the nocturnal species still picking around, and so it is the coyote who is my companion as the edge of the continent clicks into another day. Grey and rusty coats, curious and hesitant, focused and yet opportunistic, the coyote: I can relate.

Coyotes are a spotlight species because of their dazzling adaptations to shifting climate, urban footprints, food sources, on a seemingly ineluctable march across the planet. They have patrolled the land called North America for at least 10,000 years. In the twentieth century, the coyote moved from prairies, deserts, and grasslands to forests fanning out across North America. By the 1990s, the coyote arrived on the East Coast and now lives in New York City. The coyote is a species benefiting from the retreat of apex predators (although don’t we all?), which is true with an asterisk: The coyote has made it to Alaska where there are plenty of wolves and yet the coyote gets purchase. The coyote is headed south, towards the South American continent. All this raises a core philosophical question: Do we imagine this expanded range for the coyote to be a natural evolution, based on skill and adaptation? Or do we imagine this expansion to be unnatural? In the end, the fact of coyote in Central Park or the Presidio forest may be our answer.

For all their adaptive prowess, coyotes possess two known weaknesses. They are heavy sleepers, making them easy to creep up on, and they tend to look back over their shoulders when running for their lives. This looking back slows them down, making them vulnerable to being shot or otherwise caught. Given their renowned land speed—a robust 65 kilometers an hour at top speed—this looking-back habit strikes as worthy of consideration. They must be aware of their fleet-footed advantage. Has this evolved a certain arrogance, or sense, it is OK to slow down because no one and nothing is going to catch up?

No one knows for sure how coyotes came back to the Presidio, but they do believe it was sometime in 2002. I know how I got here: I had to move back to San Francisco from Iowa City, where I was teaching and living in a house with a white-picket fence because it was important for my children to live close to father, too. I did not dispute this notion that proximate parents are good for children, I just wanted to stay in Iowa. I loved the pale greenish-blue hydrangeas in spring and how at local cafés people asked quite genuinely how each other’s writing or painting or filmmaking was going. In Iowa, people have time to ask that question and to hear the answer; it is not a commercial question, and no one cares if you are not done with your work; no one says, where might I have seen your work? I loved how I could afford to live there and how there was no traffic and I could write every day and not stop and panic that I might die broke and alone, a horrible burden on my children, because I was squandering so much of my professor’s salary on things like food and shelter. It’s the making of the work that is interesting, and that is why we ask and listen to the answer.

I read speculation that the first coyotes trotted over the Golden Gate Bridge at night from Marin County. Picture that: a couple of them loping along that orange oxide bridge. Who told them the Army had retreated, and all of the buildings were largely devoid of soldiers and there were abundant moles to feast on?

The Presidio is mindful of all residents and their health and safety—preserving species is part of its charter—and there were soon signs advising all who passed to drive with care. Coyote crossing. Not long after, I began to see coyotes crossing the road by one of the signs near my house. I guess coyotes can read, too.

My son, Will, was completing grammar school and my daughter, Helena, was in third grade and they attended different schools, so after walking with the coyotes my morning was about shuttling to schools and engaging with drop-off systems. The schools designed drop-off systems to create maximum car flow—parents in orange vests would wave cars to the curb, like we were 737s taking off from O’Hare. The car door would be pulled open, and the children would pop out, all heavy backpacks and lunch totes and rolled-up artwork. It was so much more complicated than life in Iowa or New Zealand. In the afternoons, the same drill in reverse, so I calculated I had about four and a half hours of writing time and chore time before I had to get back in the car and do this in reverse. I never calculated how many hours of my life were spent driving around San Francisco, dropping off or picking up children at school or sports or plays. But I do know when people ask me why I have not finished more books or written ten screenplays and an HBO show, a part of me wants to scream, I never mastered driving and writing at the same time.

There were days when I arrived early for pick-up and would park my car and then I would wait with the others—many of the designated drivers were nannies, I quickly learned—and then I would hear other sorts of things that would distract me. One in particular struck me: At my son’s school, a mother was lamenting the fact that because of a measly snowfall at Lake Tahoe, they were not going to be able to use the enormous house they had built so the kids could enjoy ski week in the Sierras. All three of her children wanted to be on the ski team, then no snow! Instead, they all had to fly to Austria to ski. This statement fixated in my mind, and I told and retold her lament to friends in Iowa and New Zealand when they emailed and called me. It was a Margaret Mead moment. I shall always be an outsider, I would moan. I walked in the cool woods and watched the turbulent ocean pound the dark sand and thought about how to unpack the ski-mother’s lament. Was it funnier that it was a complaint or that the teller was clueless as to how it came off to the average listener? Was it funnier when you find out she was also carrying a $2,000 handbag to pick up her sons at school? Was it funnier that when she asked me what I was doing for ski week, I said I was counting coyotes in the Presidio because I am writing a report on them and I found out that their piss smells really, really strong, which is how they marked their territory, and she laughed and told me how funny I am.

Coyotes, canis latrans, eat mice, rats, gophers, insects, reptiles, carrion, amphibians, wild fruit with blueberries being a particular favorite, birds and their eggs, and pets; they hunt solo, with a companion, or in small packs. Its name is a Spanish adaptation of an Aztec word, coyotl. They are found in abundance across California, however they do well across North America, and have extended their reach from the near-Arctic to Panama. Sometimes they play with their prey before they kill and eat it. Coyotes are relatives to the wolf, fox, dog, and jackal. Long jumpers—up to four meters—coyotes adapt well to a changing environment—they are a species seemingly designed for